


sit down young stranger

by extasiswings



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Bisexual Male Character, Complicated Relationships, Constructions of Masculinity, Eddie Diaz is a Good Soft Boy, Emotional Repression, F/M, First Love, Gen, Growing Up, I don't know how to tag this really, In This House We Love And Support Eddie Diaz, Introspection, It's Crying Over Eddie Diaz Hours, Latino Character, M/M, Military Backstory, Not Totally Linear Narrative, Personal Growth, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Soft Eddie Diaz, Trauma Recovery, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24986515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: Eddie Diaz is a soft boy.  It's not a problem until it is.
Relationships: Christopher Diaz & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)/Original Male Character(s), Eddie Diaz/Shannon Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Comments: 43
Kudos: 184





	sit down young stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elisela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisela/gifts).



> Welcome to my feelings sandbox. In this house we love and support character exploration and backstory. I will just state from the outset that I don't think I'm terribly subtle in this with acknowledging the way the military preys on and exploits young men of color in discussing Eddie's experience, so if that reality makes you uncomfortable, this is probably not the fic for you. If you're fine with that, welcome to "Crying Over Eddie Diaz Hours: Backstory Edition."

Eddie Diaz is a soft boy. That’s how he feels throughout his entire childhood—soft. He’s close with his sisters, his teachers write about how helpful and sweet he is on his progress reports even if his grades are just a little above average, he’s the kind of kid who will catch spiders in cups and gently release them outside, who cries at movies where the dog dies—

When he’s younger, he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that. So what if he feels everything more than the other boys seem to? So what if most of his friends are girls? But apparently, it’s a problem, because his father signs him up for sports teams—soccer, baseball, basketball—to try and get him to spend more time with other boys, takes him out for drives where Eddie sits quietly in the passenger’s seat and listens to his dad lecture him about what it means to be a man, scolds his abuela for “coddling” him when he thinks Eddie can’t hear. 

Eddie’s soft. And it’s not a problem until it is, and when it is—well. He fakes it. Stops being as close with his sisters, stops being friends with girls, hangs out with the guys from his teams even if he doesn’t really like them—

Eddie doesn’t tell his dad that part of why he doesn’t is because of the time Kevin Waters decided to shoplift for fun when they were in a store together at age 12, that Eddie was the one who had wound up being held for an hour with nobody listening to him until the owner finally watched the security tape and confirmed he wasn’t anywhere near anything that was taken. He doesn’t tell his dad that he thinks the way those guys talk about girls is disrespectful or that the way they spit the word _gay_ like it’s a curse, something dirty, something bad, makes his stomach twist into knots for reasons he doesn’t fully understand for a few years.

Soft. He’s soft. 

Eventually it gets harder to fake fitting in with the other guys, so he just withdraws, starts biting things back, shoving them down—it works. Maybe a little too well. Because eventually, he starts to realize that instead of feeling everything, being too emotional, too expressive…it’s hard to identify anything he feels, express anything.

He doesn’t like that either. But the lectures stop.

It takes him a long time to realize that just because it makes things easier to live that way, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

* * *

Dating is—

_“Who are you going to winter ball with?”_

_“Did you hear that Kaitlyn asked out Justin in the quad?”_

_“When are you going to get a girlfriend?”_

—a minefield. A horror show. An adolescent nightmare. 

All of Eddie’s classmates seem to start obsessing over romance in eighth grade, freshman year at most, and he just—doesn’t get it. He shoots up about a foot between his freshman and sophomore years and still feels lost and confused about how exactly his limbs work by the time school starts up again. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, his joints hurt, his face breaks out whenever he doesn’t want it to, his voice keeps cracking, which is just fucking embarrassing, he’s skinny as anything despite the fact that he feels like he’s constantly eating—

The point is, he’s not even comfortable with his own body. He doesn’t really want to look at or touch anyone else’s. And he doesn’t understand why anyone else would want to look at his. But apparently…

“I know something you don’t know,” Sophia sing-songs in that way only sisters can one day while they’re waiting for the bus after school.

Eddie looks over, trying not to rise to the bait. If he seems curious, she’ll hold it over his head and never tell. 

“Uh huh, sure you do,” he says drily. “Hey—don’t forget to take that makeup off before we get home, mom’s gonna get mad if she sees it again.”

Sophia rolls her eyes and reaches into her backpack for a packet of wipes.

Frankly, Eddie doesn’t understand the problem. So Sophia likes big earrings and dark lipstick and thick eyeliner with sharply pointed wings that he finds impressive if a bit intimidating—so do at least half the other Mexican girls at their school. As far as he’s concerned, it’s her face. But their mother _hates_ it and makeup has been the subject of several arguments between Sophia and their mother and their mother and tía, who will send the girls makeup samples whenever they ask. 

“You just don’t want to be dragged into a debate about whether I look appropriately respectable at school or whether I’m going to end up coming home pregnant one day and dropping out.”

Eddie winces. Yeah, that had been a particularly bad one a few weeks prior. “Can you blame me?”

He’s pretty sure she rolls her eyes again, but she’s rubbing at her face with a wipe just after so he doesn’t get a chance to confirm.

“Straight-A honors student on track to be valedictorian, but sure, it’s my eyeliner that she cares about,” Sophia grumbles as she tosses the wipe, her face clean. 

“We both know she only comments on the things she thinks need improvement,” Eddie points out. 

For him, it’s his writing. He’s good at math—better than good, keeps his head down and looks at shapes and numbers and problem solves easily because numbers make sense to him and always have. Words are harder. Not because he doesn’t have enough—he usually has too many, his thoughts scattering in every direction so that drilling down into a single piece of analysis is harder than writing more loosely about ten. He dreads essay assignments because his mother always wants to proofread them and he knows she’s just trying to help but it’s always…an ordeal. To say the least. 

“If that isn’t the truth…”

The bus pulls up and they join the line of kids getting on it. Sophia waits until they’re settled in the back before she starts again. 

“So…you never asked what I was talking about before.”

“Yeah, because I don’t care enough to agree to do your chores for a week or whatever you were going to trade,” Eddie replies. Sophia huffs, then says without any further prompting—

“Maria Garza has a crush on you.” 

Eddie blinks. Then blinks again. Entirely against his will, he blushes. Sophia snickers.

God, he hates being a teenager. 

“Shut up, no she doesn’t.”

Because Maria Garza is the homecoming queen. She also goes to their church and sings in the choir and despite Eddie’s general belief that he is gross and weird and bodies are gross and weird, he’s pretty sure she’s an actual angel, with thick, dark hair that curls in soft-looking waves that he wouldn’t mind running his fingers through and—

Eddie shuts down that train of thought because allowing it to keep going while on the bus is a recipe for disaster. Once again, he hates being a teenager.

“She does,” Sophia insists. “She asked me for your number. And wanted to know if you already have a date to the homecoming dance.”

“What?” His voice cracks, right on schedule. “I—what did you say?”

Sophia hums and tips her head, her smile turning wicked. 

“Do the dishes for the next two weeks.”

“Done.”

“God, you’re almost too easy,” Sophia laughs. “I told her that no, you don’t have a date—you’re welcome, I left out the part where you’re a loser who wasn’t planning to go in the first place—and that she should ask you at youth group on Sunday. So…try to look nice. Or don’t. Whatever.”

So. Eddie gets a date. His first date. And it’s awkward as hell and he puts on about three times as much deodorant as he usually would and worries the entire night about sweating through his suit, but—

At the end of the dance, Maria pulls him out of the gym to the hallway of lockers out of sight of the chaperones and kisses him once, twice—he doesn’t know what to do with his hands and she laughs against his mouth and tells him to relax before kissing him again—it’s nice. Really nice. And he thinks maybe, just maybe, dating isn’t as much of a nightmare as he originally thought.

* * *

Eddie’s sixteen when there’s a boy. 

His name is Logan Kerrick and they have gym in third period and auto shop together during sixth, the last class of the day. He has blond hair and blue eyes and on the few occasions Eddie’s seen him smile, it never quite reaches them. Sometimes, in the locker room, Eddie catches glimpses of bruises on his back. 

He always looks away. 

The thing is, Eddie doesn’t even really understand why he can’t stop looking, can’t stop thinking. He likes girls. He _really_ likes girls even if he only ended up dating Maria for like a month before she dumped him for some senior football player and there really hasn’t been anyone else. 

But he can’t stop looking. 

Logan has nice hands. Artist hands, or the kind you would expect a pianist to have. Eddie dreams about them. His hands. His fingers. 

There are rules though. Eddie knows that. Don’t look too long, don’t get caught, don’t be obvious. Don’t talk about it. 

He gets caught. 

“Diaz.” Logan’s eyes are shadowed when he calls Eddie’s name as the bell rings for the end of the day. The auto shop is at the back of the school, secluded and out of the way—their teacher always leaves immediately after class and everyone else is filtering out. Eddie stops in his tracks. Swallows.

“Yeah?”

The door shuts behind the last one of their classmates. They’re alone.

“Something you want to say to me?” 

Eddie’s hands curl around the strap of his backpack. “No.”

“You sure?”

Logan steps closer and Eddie’s breath catches. Apparently it’s noticeable because Logan smiles. 

“Oh,” he says. “So you don’t want to beat me up then. I figured it was sort of a toss-up—usually is with these things.”

“Why would I beat you up?” 

Logan closes the rest of the distance—Eddie drops his backpack as he’s pushed up against a car door. 

“For this.” Eddie shivers as Logan’s mouth presses against his, as those delicate, artful fingers slide into his hair. God, he feels like he’s on fire. 

Apparently, he doesn’t just like girls.

Eddie doesn’t know how much time passes as his fingers curl into Logan’s belt loops to pull him closer, as the other boy licks into his mouth and sucks on his tongue. He’s all hard edges where Maria had been soft curves, but Eddie likes it just as much. 

Just as much.

They only get a week. A week before Logan’s father is arrested and he’s placed in a foster home in a different school district. But it’s a great week. 

Eddie spends the rest of the year thinking about blond hair and blue eyes and sadness.

* * *

He’s nineteen and finally starting community college after taking a year to work and save up for it when he stumbles into his first class barely before it’s supposed to start and makes a beeline for the first empty desk he sees.

“This seat taken?” He asks the girl sitting next to it. She smiles.

She has a nice smile.

“All yours,” she replies.

“Eddie.”

“Shannon.”

She asks him for coffee at the end of their second week.

The rest is…history really.

They date for six months before they fall into bed. Eddie’s never—he doesn’t feel like he knows what he’s doing at all, is all pins and needles and nerves. But. He figures it out.

After, Shannon curls into his side, her arm across his waist and her head on his shoulder. He thinks she’s asleep, is wondering whether he should stay and sleep himself, if he even can with as much restless energy is running through him, or whether he should go. He’s never been all that attuned to the social cues of situations like this.

Except, she’s not asleep.

“Hey, Eddie?” Her voice is quiet, a little nervous, and Eddie bites back the urge to immediately jump to the conclusion that he’s done something wrong, that there’s something he needs to fix.

He swallows hard. Wets his lips. “Yeah?”

“…I love you.”

_Oh._

That—

No one outside of his family has ever said that before. 

Eddie’s tongue freezes with nerves. Is he supposed to say it back? If he did, would he mean it?

He likes Shannon. He thinks she’s beautiful, he likes spending time with her, likes talking to her, being with her. He likes kissing her. He definitely liked doing more than kissing her. 

But all of those things added up together—is that love? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel like.

It could be love. He can’t say it isn’t. And if he can’t say it isn’t…isn’t it better to say it?

Eddie swallows again, wraps his arm around Shannon’s shoulders to pull her closer.

“I love you, too.” 

His birthday is two months later—Shannon gets sick with a bout of strep throat and has to miss the party with his family, but his makes up for it by bringing her over for dinner one night a few weeks later. 

“Your mother hates me,” Shannon frets in the car when they leave. 

“It’s not you,” Eddie assures. “She’s just—honestly, I’m not sure how much she likes me that much sometimes and I’m her son. And it was only the first time. She’ll get to know you, it’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’ll be fine.”

Except, his parents don’t really get more of a chance to get to know Shannon. Because two weeks after that, she shows up at Eddie’s door in tears with three positive pregnancy tests in hand and the world drops out from under him.

She spends an hour crying and talking in circles while pacing his apartment—between bouts, he catches bits and pieces of explanation, something about the medication she took when she got sick messing up her birth control—not letting him get a word in edgewise. It’s like there’s a rock in his stomach or lead in his veins—he feels like if he was dropped in a body of water he would just sink straight down and drown. He is terrified. He wants to run as fast and as far as possible because he’s only just stopped being a teenager, he has a high school diploma and a handful of community college credits, the economy is still tanked—he’s terrified. But. He did this. He was part of it. Is part of it. So Eddie does the only thing he knows he can do.

“Marry me.”

Shannon stops mid-sentence and stares at him. “What?”

His heart is racing and his palms are sweaty, but his voice has never been steadier. 

“Marry me.” 

She swipes at her eyes and exhales shakily. She still looks tense, somehow fragile and small, fading into herself as her arms come down to wrap around her middle. Eddie isn’t sure if he should touch her, if that’s what she wants, if it would help—his go-to for overwhelming situations like this has become shutting down, waiting to try and tease the mess apart until he’s alone. He’s not supposed to break down himself, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try to help her.

Slowly, Eddie crosses the room. Shannon flinches when he gently touches her shoulder, but unwinds herself enough to step into his space and cling before he can back off. 

His heart is still racing.

“Are you only asking because I’m pregnant?”

Now, Eddie may not know everything, but he knows that the answer to that question can’t be _yes_ in so many words. And it a way it’s true—he’s twenty, they haven’t even been dating a year, haven’t lived together, are both still in school—no, under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t be thinking about marriage right now when he can barely even pay his own bills as it is. But it’s also—it’s what you do when you get pregnant. You get married. He’s not going to be one of those deadbeat assholes that abdicate all responsibility and walk out on their girlfriends and have to be hounded by social services to pay child support. He’s not that kind of guy. 

“Sure, maybe it’s a little early,” he admits quietly, the words muffled by her hair. “But…I love you. And I want us to be a family. So. Will you?”

Her eyes are wet again when she lifts her head from his chest.

“Yes.”

* * *

_What do you want to be when you grow up?_

Eddie is six years old the first time he remembers being asked what he wants to be when he grows up. He says an astronaut because he’s just finished watching an episode of The Magic School Bus about space. His mother laughs, as do the rest of the adults in the room. He doesn’t understand why it’s funny.

It’s not a question he gets better at answering the older he gets either. He knows what he doesn’t want—he doesn’t want to be like his father, getting on a plane or in a rental car every other week, putting on a suit and hating his job every day—but that’s about it. 

The military is—the military. It’s hard _not_ to think about it when he lives in close proximity to a major army base, when his classes go on field trips there, when school counselors like to talk about the benefits of ROTC and how the army is a great way to pay for college. Eddie can never help but notice the way that last argument goes a hell of a lot farther with the kids from his neighborhood and those like it than with the mostly white kids who are going to college anyway. 

But. Eddie doesn’t really love that option either. 

He’s just started the sixth grade when he wakes up one morning to the sound of a plate shattering in the kitchen, when he jumps out of bed to see his mother staring at the television set in shock where a news clip is replaying footage of a smoking skyscraper collapsing in on itself, piles of rubble on the ground—Eddie doesn’t quite understand it at first, but something settles heavy on his shoulders nonetheless. 

After that—

Seventh grade, eighth grade, high school—he spends the rest of his childhood watching Fort Bliss kick into high gear, feeling the world shift around him, the very energy of El Paso, of the country. He has questions about war that he bites back, knowing that there’s no space for them in a post-9/11 world. Questions about why the war is in two different countries, questions about why certain people are being called terrorists, questions about the history channel special he saw on the Gulf War that makes him wonder if the U.S. wasn’t already in the Middle East, questions that arise from his discomfort with the idea of “liberating” a country halfway around the world. 

He can’t ask any of them. So. He doesn’t. 

In high school, Eddie takes the ASVAB, not because he wants to join the military, but because it means a morning off from classes with donuts in the morning and burgers at lunch. The problem is, he does well. Really well. Well enough that recruiters from pretty much every branch call him at least once a week from then on, and Eddie is constantly plying them with polite “no thank you”s, even after the economy crashes and he winds up working two, sometimes three crappy minimum wage jobs to afford a halfway decent apartment and save up for college. He keeps saying no right up until Shannon says, “I’m pregnant.”

And then it’s a different story. Then, Eddie goes to them. It’s not about patriotism or love of country—frankly, Eddie has never felt a whole lot of that, at least not in the diehard, _best country in the world_ way that some people adopt. He knows better. He’s seen too many people who look like him, just maybe a shade or two darker, get put through the wringer, thrown under the bus. He knows the military will be perfectly happy to chew him up and spit him back out and pick up another half dozen kids from his neighborhood the minute they’re done with him. He’s seen it before. His eyes are wide open. 

The army recruiter is thrilled to see him. It’s not a long conversation—Eddie’s a healthy, smart twenty-year-old. The gist is that he can start basic training in a month if he’d like and that the U.S. Army is very happy to have him.

Eddie feels a little sick. But the thought of leaving and having no plan…that makes him feel sicker. So, he stays. 

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he blurts out, the words completely unbidden as the conversation starts winding down, and his stomach immediately drops as the recruiter slowly lifts his head from the pile of paperwork. 

_Fuck_. Eddie’s pretty sure that he’s just blown it completely, that the man is going to say _actually, no thanks_ and show him the door. But instead, to Eddie’s surprise, he laughs.

“Soft touch, huh? You’re not the first, trust me.” And Eddie isn’t sure whether that means it doesn’t matter or if the recruiter really just doesn’t care as long as he can add Eddie’s name to his monthly enlistment quota, but the man flips back to Eddie’s test scores and hums thoughtfully.

“You know, you have great technical skills, son,” he says, looking back up. “Could look at turning you into a combat medic.”

A medic. Putting people back together instead of just taking them apart, taking care of them, healing them—

Yes. Yes, that’s what he wants. If he has to be a fucking soldier, at least let him do some good.

“What would I have to do?” Eddie asks.

“It’s an extra sixteen weeks of advanced training after your ten of Basic, covering patient care, emergency medical techniques, that sort of thing. But it also pays more, so there’s that too.” 

On one hand, Eddie thinks maybe he should talk to someone else about this. Talk to Shannon. Talk to his parents.

But, he just—he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to do. Ask his parents to support him and Shannon and the baby until he’s able to finish school and find a better job than the minimum wage drags that he was doing before? That’s not an option.

This—this is a good idea. A salary, health insurance, hell, even housing. And it doesn’t have to be forever. He can do training and one tour maybe—that’s, what? A couple of years? Just to get them started. To get them on their feet. And then maybe after that he can go back to school, figure out what it is he really wants. 

So. He doesn’t ask for time to think about it, to talk it over with his wife. Instead, he just says—

“Where do I sign?”

* * *

It’s fitting, in a strange way, Eddie thinks the first time he jumps out of a helicopter and lands in the sands of Afghanistan several months later. His Saint Christopher medal clinks against his dog tags, the reminder of his newborn son fresh in his head. Patron saint of travelers.

His confirmation name was another patron of travelers—Raphael, the archangel, perhaps better known for being the patron of nurses, medical workers, doctors. Healers. It was a choice he’d taken very seriously at the time, a studious seventh-grader tasked with what felt like the most important decision he’d ever had to make, and he’d spent weeks going through the litany, over the martyrs and those who lived, the angels and the apostles and all the rest. There had been a lot of Michaels and Georges and Theodores in his year—the angel and military saints. But Eddie had wanted something—something different. Even then, he hadn’t wanted to be a soldier. 

He hasn’t been to church regularly since he got his driver’s license and could choose whether or not he wanted to sit through mass or sleep in, since the day he also decided it was counterproductive to sit through a service supposedly about love and faith and goodness when every other homily was bigotry disguised as faith, hypocrisy staged as righteousness. Eddie doesn’t think he needs that to be a good person—in fact, he’s pretty sure he’s a better one without it. 

Besides which, he and God—well, they have a bit of a rocky relationship anyway. Eddie thinks sometimes that maybe faith would be easier if he didn’t question things so much, but he can’t not have questions, have doubts. He feels—or at least he felt growing up, before he started trying not to—too much. Too much empathy, the weight of every slight, every injustice—even as he’s gotten older and learned to feel less, he still looks around and sees so much cruelty and thinks— _why_?

It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God. He’s just not sure God gives a damn most of the time. 

Christopher is baptized the day that Eddie fails to save two soldiers who were caught in a blast a few miles from their camp after hitting an IED. It’s not his fault—he’s not the only medic and they weren’t the only two injured, he knows that none of them can save everyone—but it hits him hard. There’s blood on his hands, on his uniform, he’s grimy with sweat and dirt, and there’s a scream trapped behind his teeth that he can’t let out.

He thinks— _My son is being baptized today_ —and then, of the men whose hearts stopped under his hands— _What happened in their lives today, on the other side of the world? A baptism, a first communion, a soccer game? Who was waiting for them?_

“Diaz.” Eddie jumps at the soft voice, the hand on his shoulder. 

Charlene is from Houston, on her third tour. She’s a good medic, a good soldier. A good friend—she saw him stumbling around unsure when he first arrived and took him under her wing, taught him how to play the guitar in the quiet hours, traded stories with him about her partner back home—but fuck, he really doesn’t want to see her right now. She saved the people she worked on earlier.

“You should get cleaned up,” she adds. “You’ll feel better.”

“Did they have kids?” He asks. 

“Don’t do that,” she replies. “Don’t do that to yourself. Shit happens and there’s not a single one of us who doesn’t have somebody back home, whether that’s a kid or a partner or a parent or a friend. If you let yourself fixate on that with every loss, you’ll never survive this, which isn’t fair either—you’ve got people too.”

Eddie rolls his shoulders to get the cricks out—he’s been sitting in the same spot tense for so long that it hurts—then clears his throat. 

“How do you deal with it?”

Charlene shrugs. “I pray a lot. Which, some days really just means a lot of swearing and yelling at God until I feel better or until I wear myself out, whichever comes first. Some days it’s a rosary for the families, since that’s mostly about Mary anyway. It really depends. You just gotta find something that works for you.”

Saying a rosary actually sounds…weirdly nice. His abuela has one that she got when she was still a girl in Mexico—Eddie used to touch the beads when he was a kid, even before he knew the prayers, carved wood polished smooth from years of use that carried an energy that might make him superstitious even if he weren’t already a believer. 

“Got one I could borrow?”

“Not when you look like that—clean yourself up and we’ll talk.”

The beads on Charlene’s rosary are white plastic, but there’s still something in them nonetheless. Or maybe Eddie just wants there to be. 

He prays a decade for each of the soldiers, for their families, for his own—

—and finally, for himself.

When Charlene’s tour ends a few months later, she gives him her guitar. She doesn’t say anything else about it, but she leaves the rosary in the case.

* * *

Christopher is diagnosed with CP and Eddie—

“I can’t believe you would do this without even talking to me about it!”

—Eddie re-enlists. 

His head is a mess. He feels stuck, trapped, like he can’t breathe. It was supposed to be one tour, one stretch of time to get them started, and then he was going to be done, going to come home, going to stay. But he comes back and everything is…hard. He feels like he can’t do anything right, doesn’t know how to hold his son or get him to stop crying or feed him or anything else—he’s afraid to even touch Christopher half the time because he’s so worried that he’ll do something wrong, mess up, hurt him somehow—and besides that there are so many doctors visits and bills and he just—

Panics. 

Eddie doesn’t know how to do anything else. He doesn’t know. But he knows how to work. He knows that he can stay in the army, keep his benefits so Christopher can keep being treated by good doctors, keep them in their house, keep them out of debt. 

He knows it’s not enough. Knows that he resented his own dad for not being around regularly for most of his life, but he can—he can still do better. He’ll be better. It won’t be forever, just another couple of years. Kids don’t even really remember those early years anyway, right? 

Just another couple of years. And then he’ll figure everything else out. Christopher will be a little older and maybe Eddie won’t be so afraid to touch him, won’t be so terrified.

Eddie loves his son. His relationship with Shannon—that’s something else, something complicated and messy and difficult, and he wonders sometimes if she hadn’t been his first real long-term relationship if he might have been more careful, might have understood himself better, might have understood his feelings better, he thinks back to their first night, when he wasn’t sure whether or not to say _I love you_ and wonders if he should have just said he needed more time to figure it out because now he’s been saying it for so long that he thinks it must be true but—

But he loves Christopher. That he knows, no question, no doubt. He just…doesn’t know how else to be a parent. 

There’s a night before he leaves again when he can’t sleep, his head still back in the desert, the sounds of the city outside the window too loud and unfamiliar despite the fact that he spent twenty years before his tour falling asleep to them every night. He gets up and goes to Christopher’s room. He doesn’t want to disturb him, but after a few minutes Christopher wakes up anyway, not screaming, just quietly fussy in a way Eddie’s beginning to identify as the danger zone before the point of no return.

Eddie clears his throat and looks over the edge of the crib. Fuck. Okay. He can figure this out. 

“Hey, buddy,” he says quietly. With the perpetual nerves that set in every time he tries, he gently reaches in and picks Christopher up. And then, he starts cycling through the list of _what doe the baby need to stop crying_. He tries a bottle with no response, checks Christopher’s diaper but finds it clean, tries toys, a blanket—nothing seems to work and Christopher gradually gets more fussy. Eddie swears internally and tries sitting in the rocking chair.

“Okay, buddy, work with me? Please?” He’s a little bit out of ideas when he thinks about a song Charlene taught him when she heard he had a kid. He doesn’t really consider himself any great talent, and he’s not entirely convinced he won’t just make it worse, but—

“When it’s midnight on the meadow…and the cats are in the shed,” Eddie starts softly, his thumb stroking lightly at Christopher’s hairline as he tries to remember the words, “…and the river tells a story at the window by my bed…”

The fussing gets quieter. Eddie’s heart skips. “…if you listen very closely…be as quiet as you can…in the yard you’ll hear him…it is the pony man…”

There are a lot of verses and a lot of words that he knows he mixes up and twists around, but Christopher isn’t going to know that. And by the time Eddie finishes, he’s asleep, and Eddie kind of wants to cry because he managed to do one thing right. 

“I’ve never heard you sing before.” Shannon is leaning in the doorframe, the throw from the back of the couch wrapped around her shoulders.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll be winning any Grammys any time soon, but…”

She shakes her head. “No, really, it was—nice.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Shannon nods at the baby monitor. “Force of habit.”

The silence stretches between them like a gulf, but at least it isn’t tinged with ice, with the bitterness and resentment that’s lingered in the air since he first mentioned re-enlisting. It feels a little bit like a truce.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About…”

“Me too,” she sighs. “I know that you’re…”

“Yeah.”

“…come back to bed.”

“Okay.”

* * *

Eddie’s taken fire before. He’s lost people before. He’s had moments where he could have sworn up, down, and sideways that he was going to die. 

The last time is different. He can’t explain it, wouldn’t know where to even start. But he gets shot three times and saves multiple lives and all he can think when he wakes up in the field hospital is—

_It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. I failed._

Maybe it’s just survivor’s guilt, whatever. But it’s how he feels. Because sure, Eddie has Christopher, but Christopher—he’s young. He’s mostly known his dad from the other side of a video screen. The other guy—his kids knew their dad—and Eddie doesn’t understand why he couldn’t have just—

He gets a medical discharge after that, sent home with a medal and directions for several months of physical therapy and scans to make sure his shoulder recovers properly. His tour was set to end soon anyway.

_Thank you for your service, but we don’t need you anymore._

The problem is he’s…lost. He jumps at loud noises, at unexpected touches, gets phantom pains in his shoulder and hand that have nothing to do with PT and everything to do with his messed up head. 

He sleeps on the couch a lot because he wakes up shaking and sweating half the time, with blood and smoke in his nose, half a world away, and Shannon had turned away the first time it happened in their bed. So…he sleeps on the couch whenever he thinks he might not be okay. He’s taken enough from her, put her through enough—there’s no reason why she shouldn’t sleep just because he can’t.

Eddie knows there’s a lot that’s strained between them. He just—can’t fix it. She wants to move, to leave, and Eddie doesn’t know how to explain that even though El Paso is far from perfect, that his parents are difficult, it’s still home, it’s familiar, and he thinks if he leaves before he’s ready he’ll sink like he’s stepped into quicksand and his feet are concrete blocks. He’s already hanging by a thread. 

But his tongue gets twisted up in knots whenever he even considers trying to explain that, like he’s back in the eighth grade with his dad telling him to stop being so emotional—he’s buried under a mountain of shame that he can’t just have it together, be okay, be what Shannon needs, what Christopher needs, what his parents need.

“I need more time,” he says, and Shannon looks at him like she doesn’t even see him. 

_I need time too_ , is what she writes in the note she leaves behind when she walks out and Eddie—

—he doesn’t blame her for leaving him. He doesn’t expect her to fix him or even to stick around while he fixes himself, if that’s even possible. They got married in a courthouse, not a church—there was no _for better or worse_ in their vows, it’s not what she signed up for. But he does resent her a little as weeks turn to months turn to years and she never calls or writes and Christopher asks about his mom less and less because Eddie’s answers are always inadequate. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t like feeling that way, but he can’t quite help it.

* * *

Christopher…is soft. 

Eddie works three jobs and is barely around, but when he is—God. He doesn’t know what he did to deserve such a beautiful, perfect kid. Christopher is so free with affection, loves so openly, is the kind of kid who makes drawings for his teachers and asks endless questions, and it makes Eddie _ache_. It reminds him of himself, how he used to be before he forced himself into a box, and there’s something vicious and protective inside of him that swears nothing is ever going to make Christopher feel like he has to stifle his softness. 

“You coddle him too much. It’s not good for him to be so sensitive,” his mother says once, and Eddie’s jaw tenses.

“He’s six,” he replies, keeping his voice carefully level. “And he’s my son. So I’ll let him be as sensitive as he wants to be.”

It’s the only thing he really puts his foot down about without having to think, without having to talk himself into it or work up to being firm and setting boundaries with his parents. 

Christopher is soft. And Eddie grits his teeth and dives deep and tries to unwind all the tangled knots in his head so that he can be there for his kid, to model something other than cold distance. It’s agonizing and he’s unable to apply it to other areas of his life, but with Christopher—despite the fact that Eddie thinks he’s probably fucked up the most with Christopher, it’s the one area where he doesn’t feel like a total fuck-up. At least, not when Christopher smiles at him and hugs him and begs to be sung to or read to or tucked in. The only problem is, he doesn’t have enough time.

So. Eddie figures out how to make time. He applies to firefighter academies because he was a combat medic and thinks that he would be good at being a firefighter and EMT, because it would be a good job with good, union benefits and security—one job, not three—and gets accepted to several. His parents aren’t happy, but Eddie feels, for the first time in years, like he might actually have found a way to keep his head above water. 

“Hey, buddy,” he says, holding Christopher on the porch, resting his chin on the top of his head, “what would you think about the two of us moving to Los Angeles?”

And it’s a resounding yes. 

Eddie breathes.

* * *

Eddie is twenty-eight when there’s another boy—well, a man. This one also has blond hair and blue eyes, but his smiles come easy and light him up like sunshine. 

And he stays. 

And Eddie is soft.

And it’s not a problem.

**Author's Note:**

> The song Eddie sings to Christopher is "The Pony Man" by Gordon Lightfoot. It appears on the album "Sit Down Young Stranger" (which conveniently is a protest song and also provided the title for this fic).


End file.
